Everybody, it’s Michael Martin, thanks for being here. Happy Monday. Hope you had a great trading week. A lot of volatility out there. So that might help some of you. It might hurt some of you, but either way, I hope you’re weathering it. I get a lot of great feedback from folks, and I just want to give a shout out to everybody who’s making comments and writing in it means a lot that some of it right, I can’t be perfect, but at least some of it might be resonating with you and helping you evolve in your trading game. So I want to talk today about trading and progress in your trading game. One of the expressions that you hear a lot around coaching is progress, not perfection. And folks seem to be like to be saying, get 1% every day. Well, again, at 1% every day, you’re going to more than double your money by the end of the year if you think about it. So if you can do that in your personal life, you’re cooking with gas. I mean, that’s incredible. Now, I started thinking about this. We talked about ganja and I talked about a question that had come in about a person who was trading, I think a micro contract for a year and hadn’t shown any progress. And so I think we answered that in this coming Wednesday’s video, which is already recorded.
And I started to think about it again, there’s two sides to every trade. So you might not show financial progress, but maybe you’re coming more to terms with who you are as a trader and what it is that you can do, right? I mean, you can’t make it any smaller if you’re trading a micro contract. But the main thing is, and I’m just looking at my notes, you can track how you feel like if you were in constant and utter fear when you started, but now at least you understand the dynamics of the market. It might be a little awkward to have made some emotional or maturity style progress but not financial progress. Well, that kind of kicks in because sometimes the stuff doesn’t work or evolve at the same time. You can learn things intellectually about the marketplace and how to trade trading tactics, trading chart patterns, this and that.
Trading systems. The list goes on of all the crap that’s out there, but you might be the hardest nut to crack yourself. In other words, how do you acquire self-knowledge? You see, that’s the tougher ball of wax, and that’s kind of why I focus on that part of it on the show because to be frank, anybody who’s looked at a chart for six months can record a video and put it on YouTube. It’s free. You can use your phone, doesn’t cost you anything but the time you put into it and give you their 2 cents on a chart. But what you have to understand that chart patterns are a lot like human beings. And there’s people that, they’re acquaintances, there’s some people that you’re friends with and you actually, and then there’s other people who you might have something more formal like a business relationship. You might have romantic relationship.
And then even in that dating, you might have folks that you like to spend time with or hook up with, but there’s varying degrees of chemistry. And so what I’ve been trying to educate everybody on is that those chart patterns and those setups have an emotional output as well that is either going to resonate with you or not. So we talk about that compatibility in people. We call it chemistry. So I think that you’ll end up having a relationship with that type of chart pattern of that setup. And so going back to the original question, progress not perfection. You might be a very, very loyal person who doesn’t like to quit. I’m one of them. I wouldn’t say I’m stubborn, but I know that my goal can be the same, but the way that I get there can change. So don’t be afraid to shake things up a little bit and try another instrument. You might be trying to guess the headlines every morning and pick a direction in one of the indices, which is really, really difficult to do.
Whereas I do advocate trying to understand what the crowd’s going to do, trying to understand that behavior within any short term aspect to me is very, very difficult even for the best of them. Now, there are a handful of traders that can do it and I applaud ’em, but I also know that the greatest number of people who fail are the ones who are trying to sit there and kind of hammer over their heads with these trading stock index futures, intraday, trying to catch the emotion of the day as opposed to what are the forces going on during the week. So just be kind to yourself and realize that as long as you’re making an attempt, you look, if you took you another year to answer the question, you still would’ve completed or gotten to a place of confidence and the ability to execute in half the time that in less than half the time that it took me.
So if you look at me as some kind of harbing or then by all means do it. I feel like everybody is as unique as their fingerprint, so there’s no one way to do it. But I just know that if you’re struggling and you’re not putting any points on the board, it might be time to shake things up a little bit. But also remember, the main takeaway from today’s discussion is that there are two ways to progress. There’s your emotional and psychological progress, and then there’s your tactical progress. I suppose there’s a third, which we can take tactical and talk about the analysis because if you’re running a system, you have to know enough to build the set of rules that are robust across any number of instruments. It could be five, it could be 60 futures contracts, it could be the 100 securities in the NASDAQ Index, for example. Or it could just be a
Basket that you’ve put together back test that make sure that you’ve included at least 10 years. And I’d be so bold as to say, make sure that you know what happened to those types of names in oh 7, 0 8 when the market was under duress. You see what I’m saying? Because that’ll be very telling on what you might face going forward. If you’re a chart reader, the same type of a deal, pick one or two chart patterns and just stick to one of them as opposed to trying to trade all 12 of them. Very confusing for the newer mind. It’s very difficult to build confidence if you’re all over the place. So kind of bifurcate what you think your progress is. Is it on you, the person, or is it on you? Your trading in the analysis system or discretionary stuff? And then tactically, because then you have to pull it off. And there might be nuances in how you create alpha when you look at how you actually deploy the trade, you see. Anyway, I appreciate everybody being here. Please like and subscribe to the channel. If you haven’t already gotten a copy of the audiobook version of my book, the Inner Voice of Trading, you can get that over at Martin Chronicle, top right corner of the page, and it’s all yours. Thanks for being here, folks. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Hey everybody. Happy Friday. Hope you have had a good week and you have exciting plans for the weekend. I know I’m going to see, lemme just check the date here. Yeah, I think I have good plans. Lemme see. Yeah, none other than my good friend Sean McLaughlin, Chicago Show is going to be in town, so we’re going to have a bite to eat, a bite to drink that we go hard on Saturday night. So I’m looking forward to seeing him. Great guy. And there you have it. So I want to talk to you today again and kind of summarize some things we talked about this week, especially from Tuesday and yesterday’s episode in that as far as your career goes and your aspirations for trading, even if you’ve been in the business 10 years and you want to expand, you are both at the same time, the pilot and the navigator of that process.
We live in a paradigm of personal responsibility. If something’s not working, you haven’t put focus on it and it’s kind of your fault, and I’m not putting a stick in your eye, but as soon as you start to accept responsibility for what is either working or not working in your life, in your career, the sooner you can say, I am the solution. Right? I am the solution and I need to ask better questions of myself. Open-ended questions and find those answers. And it’s okay to feel stonewalled. It’s okay to feel like you’re not making any progress if you can’t push through this barrier. But if you’re persistent and you ask yourself good, open-ended questions, I believe that you can take a little personal inventory and figure it out. And I use that analogy because it’s something that’s very, very important to me. It doesn’t allow me to become a victim ever.
I don’t get the poor me because I’m insulated from that bullshit just not going to happen. If there’s something I want in my life or there’s something that I don’t have, I haven’t dreamed a big enough dream, you see? And so I always say to myself, I’m always sitting at the head of the table no matter what seat I’m in, and I am the pilot and the navigator, and I have to make it happen. And if I’m lazy, it’s probably not going to happen. If I don’t put the work in, it’s not going to happen. If I’m not motivated, it’s not going to happen. But ultimately it’s on me. If I act intentionally, typically good things will come my way. Now, the way I get to be pilot and navigator is with the stuff that I spoke about this week, especially yesterday, and asking people who are very successful, maybe even more successful than me about how to achieve certain things. So I get additional insight because I’ll try anything once. I’m not afraid of failure. And if someone comes up with an idea that seems completely out of left field, it might actually be the gem of gold that I’m looking for and what it cost me, $200 bottle of Joseph Phelps Insignia wine or whatever it might be, that could end up meaning a couple hundred thousand dollars to me over the years. You see? So again, you get what
You pay for, you get people to appreciate you. It also keeps you in a good mindset that you’re absolutely in control, and there is no chance in me becoming a victim. I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said, successful people look for the right circumstances, forgetting in what they want in life, forgetting what they want in their life, and if they can’t find them, they create ’em. So this would be very, very empowering for you. You can do it. Someone had to think about an online marketplace in an ideation that we now know as Amazon. Then they had to go fill in the pieces, right? Didn’t it start as an online bookstore or something like that? I remember watching Amazon and books, A million come up around a similar time, so I might be a little bit off, but again, it starts with the idea and then it was the evolution.
And so as far as I’m concerned, if we’re not evolving, it’s not like we’re dying, but there is a stagnation. So I always like to have some goals. I went to that art class on Thursday nights. It’s a graduate class and some very, very talented people who do things very, very differently from me. And at first blush, it’s a little intimidating. Some of these people are doing portraits. They look like Rembrandts stuff from the Renaissance period. It’s almost like they took a four K camera and took a picture. And I’m like, I don’t even know how long it take you to do that. And one of the young women said, oh, it took me about three, four weeks. And I was like, wow, that’s pretty remarkable to have that much detail with a brush, an oil paint. It’s quite remarkable. So we started sharing ideas and she’d look at some of my stuff and said, I’m very intimidated by your stuff.
It seems very aggressive and very, the term she used was B D E, which I’m not going to discuss here. It was a bigger canvas, it seemed. The gestural marks were kind of aggressive and it was very, very different. So we could learn from one another. And so I’m going to try my hand at doing things very, very differently just as an exercise, just to grow my brain. And we’re going to share some ideas. We actually did an exercise in class where she put up three pieces of her work. I put up three of mine, and we each picked one, and we tried to paint in each other’s style, talk about grabbing a brick. It was very intimidating, and I was probably the oldest one there. I mean, I was invited in as a guest. It’s a graduate course, but these people have serious chops sitting there. I’m not a big brush guy. I’m mostly pallet knives and oil sticks, which I do kind of by hand. So a brush doesn’t feel natural in my hand as trying to move color on canvas or make gestural marks. And so I’m like, okay, if that’s the weakest link in my game, I can either continue to say that out loud and own it, or I can actually try and
Practice it and make a change. Whether or not it makes a difference isn’t necessarily important. It’s that I get to grow as a person. You see, I’m challenging myself with something that seems very foreign. It seems a little intimidating. Of course, there’s not really any money on the line, but I’m always interested in going after the things that feel weird and feel awkward. Then everyone’s looking at the work and they’re looking at the original and they’re like, that’s what you think this looks like. You know what I’m saying? So it’s intimidating in its own way. The same way you might feel if you’re talking to a very well established trader about your trading style, same energy. Doesn’t matter how we get to the feeling, the feeling is the same, and we can share that feeling, right? That’s how we can connect with one another. So when you think about life in those terms, it’s true for your personal life.
It’s one of the reasons why I think folks who do some of the one-on-one stuff, they feel like not only did their trading improve, but their lives improved. Why is because we apply the same technology to the things in your life that are important, as is your trading. And all of a sudden everything gets better. And a big part of that is ownership. And I like to say that to myself a lot. And I’m driving in the car, things aren’t going my way. I’m like, look, throw, don’t start pouting about stuff. Doesn’t get you anywhere. Stay in the solution. How can you try things differently? Who can you email? Who can you call? What’s another way? Because life is probabilistic. What’s another possible outcome of this? What’s another approach to help you get to the same point B? So I constantly say in the solution, knowing that there might be five or six attempts at something that don’t work out.
Either they need more time or there was just no interest or it never got any lift. But the main thing is that I say like, okay, I’m still the pilot and the navigator. I need to ideate more, meditate more. Maybe pick up the phone and ask people what they think and then just keep moving forward. The key part to the success though is the ownership and knowing that you’re actually in control, even though you feel like you’re out of control, even when you don’t have any evidence that what you’re working on is coming to fruition, I promise you, if you keep taking the steps sooner or later, you’re going to start panning for gold and you’re going to see some gold flakes in the bottom of your pan. So stick with that and evolve it further. Then that when that stalls, you can pivot and use that as a resource and then build upon it. Now you’re onto step two. You didn’t even know it, but it’s about ownership and it’s about saying, I own the process. For better or for worse, I own the process and the results are going to come from my sweat equity. I am going to write up the flight plan and then I’m going to steer the ship. Anyway, I hope that helps. I hope you have a great weekend. I’ll let you know how things go with Sean next week, and I will see you Monday. Take care.

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Yo. Yo, yo, what do you know? Happy Thursday, folks. So today I want to continue the conversation about environment and talk about the two environments that you have. You have an outside environment, which we touched upon Tuesday, but we also have the internal environment. I mentioned that one thing that you can do is eliminate the noise literally and figuratively from that of which you can see or that you can hear, but also it’s also your consciousness and what’s your self-talk like? How do you speak to yourself when you’re talking to yourself through your conscious, your conscience, right? And my self-talk is actually very, very strong. I didn’t know it when I was starting out. I was also very hard on myself, perhaps like you are too, because I wanted good things for myself and I didn’t know how to calibrate how quickly I should be achieving success for the work that I was putting in.
I thought it would be much more immediate. That seems like it’s a typical guy thing. So I don’t think that I’m terribly unique in that regard. But I’ve come to learn and to understand and hope, share with you here that it’s life on life’s terms. Sometimes it comes in moments and you’ll get some breakthrough and then you’ll plateau, and then things will be like coasting at I’m not making any progress. And then boom, you get a new aha moment and you go up and it looks like your equity curve. So one thing you can work on, aside from building a community of like-minded people who may or may not even be traitors, it doesn’t matter. It’s better if it is. If they are, is what does your internal dialogue look like? And so I was lucky again, and I was born that way, and that I had a strong sense of self.
I could envision a different life than the one I had been born into and one that I wanted to aspire to. And it’s kind of like be, do, have. I had to act apart. You had to take the initiative and behave the way you think that person would behave. And let’s face it, it feels ridiculous a little bit at the beginning. You don’t even know what you’re doing, but what you can say is, if I don’t change, things will be the same tomorrow. That’s guaranteed. Very rarely are you going to just step in shit, and all of a sudden things just happen for you. Can’t happen once in a blue moon. My experience, it happens to the folks who aren’t even necessarily hard chargers, but they’re persistent and they’re relentless. And I’m not talking about going hell bent for election or running at a blue streak. I’m just saying that every day they act intentionally with respect to their goals. A big part of that is what is going on inside between your ears and how do you talk to yourself in those moments when you do have the quiet time? Because you realize that you can’t get good trading ideas off the TV screen during the day.
So I used to write out on index cards, not motivating quotes that was very popular. Read all these books
And find motivational quotes. The thing is, is that if I couldn’t act on them, they seemed empty. They seemed invite, they go, oh, that one’s deep. But that’s usually as far as it goes, and the next day it’s gone. So I would try to think of something that was actionable, right? Something like they say, you are the average of the five people that you spend your time with. And so when I needed, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it seems to be said, it seems like it’s a reasonable thing to kind of study and it speaks to the episode on Tuesday. And so I would say, okay, if I wanted to reach out to these other people and kind of expand my zone, maybe there’s a 10 year time difference between my, I found myself in that situation a lot where the people that I aspired to be with or emulate were older than me, sometimes a generation older than me.
So what do I do at 24, 25 years of age when I’m calling on a 50 year old? What do you do with that person? So you have to be a little creative. What do they like to do? Do they like to walk a cigar? You can’t do that anymore. Do they like to walk a cigar in Central Park? Do they like to go to, it used to be top of the sixes now. I think it’s like a macado kind of cigar bar at 6 6 6 fifth Avenue across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, near Rockefeller Center. Do they like to golf? Are they big fans of a sporting team? And so you would say, okay, look, maybe they’re Yankee fans. So then you’d go out and pick up two tickets and say, Hey, I got an extra ticket. You don’t even have to be like, I bought you a ticket.
You get three or four tickets. You have two of your buddies come and you had the extra. And now you start to prospect into that group of people that you want to associate with that can help expand your thinking and help, not necessarily mentor you, but expose you to a different level of success than your peer group is used to. And I used to do that all the time. That’s where all my disposable income kind of went to is not necessarily prospecting these people, but just going out, seeing how they acted, seeing how they behaved, what was their mindset? How did they approach the work week? You know what I mean? And ask them not upfront and overwhelm them like they’re on the marathon, man, is it safe?
What could you do to pick their brain and say, Hey, look, I’m working on this business plan. Can you take a look at it? Sometimes they’d say, no, this was before the age of email. So I’d have to print it out and bind it and say, Hey, here’s a business plan that I’m working on. I was wondering if you just, and I’ll give you 50 bucks, or I’ll take you to dinner and I’ll pick your brain on it. It would be important to me. My peer group, they’re not business owners yet. They haven’t gone out on their own. I don’t really have anyone else to go out to. Now there’s all these mentoring places and score and this and that. It wasn’t really available to me either it didn’t exist or I was ignorant and didn’t know it existed.
So in either way, it wasn’t there. So maybe it’s a round of golf somewhere, or maybe it’s like I used to work at golf courses, so I would say, Hey, Jim McLean is a famous teacher and I can get us on for a lesson on a particular Monday after work. Can you get out a little bit early? I can make that happen. And the guy would be like, wow, you can do that. So I would do that and I’d pay a little cash under the table, this kind of deal. So you can be creative and try to invite those people into your world on the outside, and that affects your inner game. Now that you’ve pulled that off, it should fill you with confidence. It’s not because you landed a million dollar account, but it shows that you can go out, set your mind on doing something, execute it, get it done, and boost your confidence a little bit.
Now those people can also give you some very honest feedback. What I used to hear a lot is like, I’ve never had a person of your age group call me to pick my brain on these types of things. And quite frankly, I’m surprised because I feel successful and I want to give back to the community. So you’d be surprised what people will tell you if you just ask them Right now, I’ve already jumped the gun and I’m doing these damn daily videos to give back to the community for free. We might put a course together on it and take it a step further in the future. I’m talking to Ganja about it, not sure how that would work, but apparently there’s something we can do through YouTube and have a membership aspect to it and turn some of this into a more premium kind of a deal. But that helps your self-talk. It’s like, wow, I called this person. It was intimidating to do so it was effectively, maybe it wasn’t a complete cold call, but I was asking something and I was facing rejection. And so when I found, and this is part of my own self-talk, is the more I put myself in those uncomfortable situations where I had to ask people open-ended questions or yes, no questions where they could say, go forth and procreate with yourself in a manner of speaking.
More times than not, people would say yes in one way, shape, or form. They say, look, I’m awfully busy. I got young kids, or I got crap going on with work, but if you call me Friday at three, I got 15, 20 minutes for you on the phone. And that’s a win. It goes right to your mental game because now achieving a goal, you’re, excuse me, you’re executing on a task that goes towards your goal and you get some very, very valuable feedback from people like, this idea seems good, but this one’s not practical. You can change this one a little bit. Or Here’s how I would do this one even better. And it’s like, wow. Then what do you do? I don’t know. Send the person a bottle of scotch, send them one of their favorite long filler cigars. I dunno. You can get creative, do something nice, send ’em a bottle of whiskey
Or a bottle of wine, buy ’em a $200 gift certificate at a restaurant that you think is good. Say, Hey, thanks. I appreciate the effort. It means a lot to me, more than wanted to send you a little something. That stuff goes a long way people remember, and that’s a very Mike Martin way of going about stuff. The Trading Tribe was a little bit different. I lived in Los Angeles, I had to fly on a plane. That was obviously a huge commitment. So that’s kind of how I paid my tuition on some level, is making a gigantic effort to be part of that. And it’s not a subway train. A few stops down on the four train. It was a much more intense deal. Plus there was time away from the desk and the markets. So this is something that you can think about. I think it’s super valuable.
Anything that you can do to improve your sense of self-awareness, your self-confidence, it goes right into your inner dialogue and your inner chatter. And that’s something that you can focus on and you get to do so by asking people for help. Because more times than not, I mean, heck, I get emails all the time from people, what do you think of this? And sometimes I’ll say, Hey, it doesn’t matter. Here’s where I would go do further research. Or Here’s what I know in my own experience, it takes me five minutes not even to respond politely to an email, especially the ones that are clear and concise. I don’t want four paragraphs that are all blurred into one. It’s T L D R. I don’t have the time for that. I don’t need the context to just the question and then I can help. So think about that on how you can improve that in your own life.
Even here, I don’t really have time to go out because I’m busy, but if you send over an email, I’m absolutely happy to respond, point you in the right direction for this moment in time. I am looking forward to, I got a few friends coming into town this weekend. I’m going to see ’em and spend some time with them too. They’re very, very successful. And that’s all good. So that’s all I have for you today, folks. I appreciate you very much being in here. Please like and subscribe. Also, I should say this at the top of the thing, at the top of the show, but forever in a day, I’ve been given away the audiobook version of the Inner Voice Trading, which I own the rights to. So if you go to martin chronicle.com proper, look in the top right corner and you’ll see a link where you can go and get the download for the audiobook version of the Inner Voice or trading. Thanks so much for being here, folks. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Hey everybody, it’s Michael Martin. Thanks for being here. Happy Tuesday. Didn’t have an episode yesterday because markets were closed. It was Labor Day. I hope you enjoyed the three day weekend. Summer was like two weeks, right? It just flew it. Can’t even remember. It just seemed like it came and went two weeks long. Anyway, I want to follow up. Oh, ganja always gets angry. Please like and subscribe. If this is a channel you dig and you like what we say, we get to see the data and it certainly helps us. As he says it, it helps the algorithm. And God knows when you run a YouTube channel, that’s your ethos. You have to feed the algorithm.
So I want to talk about the mental game, of course, and it’s really important stuff because you never know, man, as life happens, things kind of creep into your life. You have to be hypervigilant about who and what you let into your world. For example, I don’t run the TV and listen to the news because everything is polarized and it’s either trying to push you or pull you, right? So if you look at any particular story and you look at it through that lens, it’s hard to debate me that that’s not the case. You think it’s in the information business. But now, again, since the abolition of the fairness doctrine, I think in 91, everything is very polarized now, and it’s one camp against the other. And I don’t typically need anyone to try to steer my thinking. I like to do my own thinking. You just give me the who, what, when, where, why, and how, and I’ll make my own decision. That’s the last thing any of these networks want. They want you to become emotionally invested, put a stick in someone’s eye. Then have you go to social media, especially when you get angry because anger is the number one emotion that’s shared in social media.
But I want to talk to you about, I can remember growing up my dad saying to me, show me your friends. I’ll tell you a little bit about yourself. There’s probably a few ways to say the expression, and I didn’t fully understand what he meant, but it’s a reflection of what’s going on in your head. So I want you to think, starting today and tomorrow, I’ll have ganja Thursday, Friday. We’ll talk more about it. Who do you have around you? What’s your current environment? If they’d say that we are products of our environments, what are you doing to control your environment? Because if we’re going to set goals and have plans and take actions so that we’re not reacting to things, we’re responding to things with a clear ethos and a fundamental understanding of what it is that we’re trying to achieve. What are you doing in your physical environment that speaks to the people around you? Who are your coaches? Who do you listen to? What do you let inside you? What do you surround yourself so that if they emit any type of stimulus that you’re picking up with any of your senses, you see it. You hear it
Especially right? Because you can touch, you can taste, you can smell, but it’s mostly mental. So it’s based on what you see and what you hear. And so you can go on a diet of the mind and start to cut some of that stuff out. That’s why I don’t even know why some of these places have TVs on with the mute button on. It’s just all noise, basically. Their data points, I suppose. But the noise to signal ratio seems to be extremely high. So I just don’t even let that into my day because shame on me. If I don’t know what it is that I’m trading, I have to get a trade signal from the TV screen. There’s no thing that I would need to know and shoot from the hip on any particular day. Everything would already have been on my radar. So success rubs off from other people to you.
And also if you have people who aren’t striving to make better improvement, that’s redundant to make improvement on themselves, they could actually be inadvertently holding you back subconsciously just because they’re not striving. Now, you can find yourself in these situations too. When you need a boost of confidence and you realize that you might be the hard charger or the crowd or the person who’s has goals, who’s pushing and everyone else, it can fill you with self-esteem and maybe that you’re better than them. That’s probably not the case in that you’re better than them. You just have a different sensibility of different motivation, but nothing can help you grow faster than when you surround yourself with other like-minded people like you, right? That’s what I mean by like-minded. This way. Everyone’s striving for something and they don’t even necessarily have to be in some of the masterminds.
There’s non traitors, but they’re successful business people. And then when you start to hear about their success, you start to say like, oh, I want to succeed too. Here’s how I can succeed in my own way. Sometimes I can borrow an idea or a certain approach, incorporate it, try it out, see what works, keep some that’s valuable and leave the rest as they say. So think about when you look at your day, and I do this a lot in any number of my journals, is I look and see like, okay, what activities am I putting on my calendar? What do I want to achieve? What are for fun and what are experimental? And especially what are those that add up to the goals that I’m trying to achieve? There’s no sense in junking up my day to appear busy without activities if they don’t somehow resonate or rhyme or conjugate with the goals that I’m trying to hit.
Want personal goals, business goals? And so you can look at your environment and say, how can you give yourself a little shot of human growth hormone on a little h d h by finding other like-minded folks who are highly motivated? Even if they’re not traders, if they’re successful business people, you can still be inspired by them to go out and be a better version of yourself. Now, I’m not saying that everyone that’s around you, if they don’t have a goal, they’re a losers, a loser. Now, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that you might find extra motivation, right? Because ultimately this, it starts with having a good attitude. You can have all the discipline in the world, but you have pissy attitude. It’s hard to succeed. We talked about that a couple months ago. So think about the people that are around you every day.
What kind of activities are they doing? Are they nine to fivers who are just going through the motions? Because ultimately that can have an impact on you. Even if you don’t talk about it, they’re not hurting anyone, but it’s not necessarily motivating to just, it’s like going to gym class in high school. As long as you show up in shorts and breathe, you’ll get credit for it because it’s all about attendance. So are you actually trying to push through and are your colleagues, your peers, your friends, whoever you associate with very, very frequently, are they actually in a similar mindset? Are they learning about their weakest link so they’re doing the same type of introspection that you’re doing and looking to make small changes? We talked Friday like one quarter percent, one half percent better every day, right? All you need is a little, it matters, folks.
I liken it to golf. If any of you have ever played golf and you’re on the tee driving with whatever club you use to drive, if you don’t hit the ball squarely and it’s not going to go in its intended direction. In fact, if you open the face just a half a degree on the club, you can find yourself 30, 40 yards from where your intended destination was. So small degree changes can make a huge impact on where you end up. So don’t underestimate how important that can be to you. You don’t necessarily have to do it. That can be your intention, intentions, equal results. So make it your goal to surround yourself with really, really good people, even if they aren’t necessarily in your field as you try to build your own community. Obviously, we have online communities because it’s important to have a group of successful people share their ideas as they say, their experience, strength, and hope.
But anyway, this is really, really good stuff. You can find inspiration anywhere if you’re struggling. They don’t necessarily have to be with traders because I know some of you live in remote areas where there isn’t a community of traders in person, but you can still find a group of people who are succeeding. They might be in a Chamber of Commerce, they might be in like a Toastmasters, I don’t know. They could be in one of these meetup groups. You can look, find them if you look hard enough, and then ask them about how they have you become so successful at a young age. Because if you ask people, that’s their favorite subject, right? Is ask them the open-ended questions about themselves. They’ll talk and you’ll be able to get a lot. I used to say to myself, do 2% of the talking to generate 98% of the conversation.
And so that can go a long way. It can also help you in business. It might also, for those of you who are a little further along in your career where you’re trying to think about running outside money, when you go do that, those people could become, they may already be prospective clients, you just don’t know it yet because you haven’t gone and met with them. Anyway, I appreciate y’all being here. I’ll see you tomorrow with Ganja, and then I’ll have episodes again Thursday and Friday to kick off September. Thanks for being here, folks. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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